Posts Tagged ‘acting’

First off, I did not misspell the title. It will all make sense in the end. I promise.

I’m at the gym working out with weights. WEIGHT training makes me feel strong, powerful, masculine, and beautiful. I can lose the expectations of society and my ego and become one with my body, pumping and stretching and falling into the music. One more bicep curl, one more pull-up, a few more crunches, and nirvana. A turn-on, a sense of accomplishment, freedom, and instant gratification in an hour and a half.

I walk back home, soaking in the vitamin D, with a spring in my step, and a drive to push forward with my creative career and my love life. I get the mail and open up a SAG residual check for $0.59. Yes, that’s right, fifty-nine cents. Hiding under a Hollywood Reporter and some bills on my steel topped table I see my audition sides and bam! Back to ego, back to thinking about the future, back to not knowing what to do, back to insecurity, and back to waiting.

I need to learn how to wait. And wait consciously, without denying my feelings and without driving myself crazy. How to just be. I need WAIT Training. I look it up on Google. Other than abstinence education, semen conservation, and waiting tables, there is nothing. Well, I am a do it yourselfer so here goes… So, those sides were for an audition for a reoccurring lesbian role in a pilot for a major network. Whoohoo! Right? No. The audition got cancelled the night before. My manager assured me it would be rescheduled. Well, that didn’t happen. Then a new slightly different breakdown was released and again my manager submitted and pitched me. Okay, still waiting.

They probably went with a name. Pretty normal in this business. Or maybe it will still happen if I just stay positive and wait.
I look up at my ceiling beams for comfort and all I see is my dead plant hanging from a metal chain.
I need a distraction. Oh look, there’s a message on my computer from a dating site. She has only one profile picture and it’s out of focus and she’s wearing sunglasses. Really? I want to fall in love with her eyes not her sunglasses. I delete her and her sunglasses from memory.
Anyway, home is where the heart is, right? Then why does my heart suddenly feel like it’s on vacation? Why does it feel like it is breaking under the pressure of stasis and loneliness?

Okay, maybe that was a little dramatic. Don’t get me wrong. I am busy as can be. Catering my ass off, submitting for projects, keeping up on my manager, auditioning for acting roles and voice overs, getting new headshots, re-doing my demo reel, writing my next feature screenplay, and trying like hell to keep up on social media, yoga, and the gym. Yet, I still have this sense that I am missing something. A sense of constantly being in limbo and not feeling quite grounded. Waiting for something. The big WAITING finger poking at the back of my mind and the pit of my stomach. And it just keeps getting multiplied. The waiting on tables to pay the bills. The waiting for casting notices that are right for me. The waiting for those perfect auditions and then waiting to book the job. And of course, the waiting during the job to do the job. And waiting for a part where I do not have a line that is either, “I am not a man,” or “ma’am I’m not a sir,” or some such variation. Granted, I have done very well with those parts and am extremely grateful. Waiting for someone to recognize that there is such a thing as a sexy, butch lesbian. Or an androgynous, lesbian lead character. Waiting to be comfortable in my own skin. Waiting to be recognized for who I am and to own that without shame or discomfort. Ironically, it is through being other characters that I really learn how to be me.

I do not just need WAIT Training for my career. I am still, almost pathetically, waiting for love. For that special someone who jumps off the page and down my pants and actually lives in Los Angeles. I just put my profile back up on the dating site after a year hiatus. If and when I actually find a potential match, there is the waiting to meet, waiting to see what they actually look like, waiting for the next date, waiting to see where it goes, or waiting for it to end.

Our lives are full of waiting. We spend endless hours in line waiting for food, waiting for entertainment, waiting to buy things, waiting to get things or ourselves fixed, and of course, waiting in the dreaded L.A. traffic. Waiting to die and waiting to live. Waiting is part of life and death. It is what we signed up for.

So how do I make it all stop? Kind of an odd conundrum. I want to find a way to stop the immobility. Maybe one way to stop waiting is to be completely present in the moment because then there is nothing to wait for. Whatever I am waiting for only exists in the future. My frustration comes from looking at my past and feeling like I should have accomplished more or done this or that. The missing link is obviously internal. So yeah, I’ve done the self- help route and therapy and Eastern philosophy and A Course in Miracles, blah, blah, blah. I know I should be embracing the NOW, living in the moment, forgetting about the past and future, and manifesting blah, blah, blah. And it is all right and true, and I get it. But why is it so darn hard to do? And then I get mad at myself for thinking that it is hard, because I should be thinking it is easy, if I really want it to happen. But I have to actually believe that and not just say it, blah, blah, blah.

My fear of waiting is not really rational. It is almost instinctual. A self- protection mechanism to soften the blow of disappointment. I actually have a lot to be thankful for. This year I booked a nice part on a major television show, Dr. Ken, and I actually had a scene with over 5 lines. I love my new manager and have been getting some great auditions and feeling confident. I am in the midst of researching and writing a love story about my gay uncle and his husband who have been together for 65 years. My uncle John was a singer, a tailor, and a war hero. He was married to a woman when he met Richard at Julliard in NYC in 1950. It was love at first site. They sang opera, taught singing together, started a vocal foundation and coached Broadway stars. They raised a son who became an actor who tore the family apart with homophobia and scientology. A true story of endless love, humor, music, tragedy, and faith. For me, it has already been an inspirational, moving, and personal journey. A feature film I starred in finally got finished after 6 years of waiting. Granted it did not turn out the way I had hoped but I learned a lot and it did get picked up by a distributer. That film, Black Tar Road, did not make it into OUTFEST but a little short I was in last year, Wedlocked, did. I’m the cute one in the white t-shirt on the right.
I’ve been waiting for years for that. I will be part of one of the biggest LGBTQ film festivals in the world. I will sit with my peers and soak in the estrogen on All Girl Friday as I watch myself on screen.I built a voice over studio out of a telephone booth and have voiced four paying projects. From all the catering work, I was finally able to ditch the 13-year-old car and buy a new one I love.

As much as I like to complain about the food service industry, it has given me the flexibility to do what I love. It also keeps me in shape and I have made some incredible friendships and made a lot of people smile. Yeah, the love life is still lacking but I’m working on that. All in all, I am pretty happy. 80% according to a test I took. Yet why do I still feel stuck in the muck of the stagnant pond of waiting?

The secret to WAIT training was whispering in my ear on the way home from the gym but I wasn’t listening. I drink a glass of wheat grass juice and the light starts seeping into my brain. Okay, so, WEIGHT training puts me in the present, one with mind, body, soul, and the universe. Lifting weights is a challenge. So is waiting. I don’t look at WEIGHT training as a chore but as an opportunity and a positive experience. Maybe if I change how I look at waiting, it won’t be quite so difficult. Look at Heinz Ketchup. Their late 70s early 80s advertising campaign with the whole, “anticipation it’s keeping me waiting,” Carly Simon song thing. They made waiting and ketchup look sensual and delicious. If they can do it, why can’t I? But, this is a new millennium. I like to be in control of my ketchup. I don’t want to feel like a powerless cog in the waiting machine. I want to slap the bottom of my bottle and spill my bloody contents all over the counter. Here I go, not wanting to wait, problem solving, and making a mess of things again.
Perhaps, I need to accept that I do not need a solution. I simply need to be comfortable with the problem. Maybe the secret to waiting is that I have to practice being at peace with the waiting and feel my feelings and just be okay in the discomfort.

Or I need more sex. Look at me, making it sound like I’m actually having sex.
There is definitely a sexual component to WEIGHT training.

The push, the build, and the pay off. My favorite part of sex is the tease. The give and take. That moment right before the thing I want is taken away is the most intense and powerful. The wanting and the yearning can be pleasing in itself. Especially if I am focused and concentrated and allow myself to feel it without fear of loss. In that instant I am in the abyss, the waiting, and yet the anticipation is intoxicating. The energy in that second right before the actual orgasm is, for lack of a better word, orgasmic. That payoff lives in every waiting moment. It is happening right now, constantly, and in complete nothingness. Maybe if I just give in and embrace it. Feel the spark hidden in the waiting where desire and gratification meet in the present moment. Then just maybe, that energy, in that positive space, will find a new home, where my heart, mind, and spirit can become one. Where motion is free to enter my life and I am free and ready to accept it.

I look up at that same dying plant and notice one long, living leaf reaching out of the bramble. Everything has its ebb and flow. I am exactly where I am meant to be right now. I am a homebody nomad exploring life through love and art. A loving person in a loving world that exists in every waiting, magical, infinitesimal moment. Waiting is simply, joyful opportunity over and over again. At least that’s what I’m going to keep telling myself. I’ll let you know how it goes…

Oh and Miss Casting Director, can you please just give me that audition, so I can blissfully experience the joyful, orgasmic, intensity of waiting to get the part, waiting to shoot the pilot, waiting for it to get picked up, waiting for the contract, and waiting for the money to rain down and wash me with love.

She slides her cold fingers under an unsuspecting belt inserting a hot magnet of our lesbian kiss.

The bass pulses through my chest as the sun beats down on my shoulder as my heart explodes with the colors of the magnetic unity of the Gay Pride Festival.

This year like every year, my first thoughts of venturing out to the Gay Pride Festival tended to be negative: the heat, the crowd, the aching feet, the lost texts, the lost friends, the smells of debauchery. I often forget the positive magnetic electricity of unbridled freedom of expression, of camaraderie, of love. One of my recent personal goals has been to become one with that positive flow of energy without taking things personally to avoid being sucked down the vacuum of fear and negativity when facing the challenges life has to offer.

A year and a half ago I was cast as the lead in a gritty independent feature film called Lot Lizard. Since then the film changed directors twice, filmed for a couple of weeks, got funding, lost funding, almost got major funding, got post production taken care of, did some more filming a year later, lost post production, got post production funding, lost post production funding, etc, etc, etc. Oh and changed titles twice. The film is now called, Black Tar Road. Anyway you get the idea.

Amber Dawn Lee, the writer, executive producer, and co-starring actress, finally decided it was time to get this film finished and she couldn’t do it by herself. She wanted me to come on as, dare I say it, PRODUCER. I had put so much time and effort already into this film, so kicking and screaming, I finally succumbed. I was doing it anyway.

We had no money, neither of us wanted to be a producer, and to make matters worse our working styles and personalities are completely different. Her creative inspiration comes in waves and spurts and her brain is in ten places at once. I think linearly and organized and like to focus on one thing at a time. We have had our disagreements.

So now here we are at the West Hollywood Gay Pride Festival with 95% of the film shot. We are handing out refrigerator magnets on the staircase landing of a packed PYT, the pride lesbian club of choice, of our Black Tar Road poster. We are hoping the magnet with our hot lesbian kiss will get us a few more likes on our Facebook page.

The magnets were my idea and on the spot, Amber, came up with the inspiration of inserting them into the unsuspecting lesbian cleavage, pocket, or pants. They loved it.

Once Amber and I learned to stop taking things personally, we were able to stop fighting and start focusing our attitudes in a positive direction. We have begun to understand and accept that we think differently and have come to realize that our differences are actually an asset. Opposites do attract if you allow each other to be their own person. Our good intensions have started magnetically attracting people to our film production. We found directors and crew to donate their time and people to donate amazing locations. Due to our hardships we were forced to adapt and create a better film.

I have also found it is important to not wallow in the why this happened or why that happened and move forward into the now. All of the people who offered money or promises that were lost along the way of making this film started with their own original good intensions. They contributed or did what they could. It is not personal. It is just something that happened. The more I am able to be grateful and find the love the happier I am, the more inspired I become, and the harder I work.

This film and myself are both works in progress and we have a long journey yet to go. Amber and I are still learning and making mistakes but trying to do them with a spring in our step and love in our hearts. We have enlisted interns and volunteers and are organizing and logging endless amounts of footage, putting together trailers, coming up with promotional ideas, and getting ready to start a fundraising campaign for editing and postproduction.

Our independent feature film, Black Tar Road, is a junkie love story between two women, a truck stop prostitute and a trucker, two lost souls, who battle their addictions and their ties to the local drug dealer, to find love in the middle of nowhere. Charlie is addicted to heroin and Heather is addicted to speed and they become magnetically attracted and addicted to each other. They learn to accept each other for who they are. I play the character of Heather, who eventually finds faith through finding the love within herself. Through playing this character and the ups and downs of producing this film I found faith in the love within myself. I am feeling that gay pride, that camaraderie, and that love that unites every one of us. The magnetic flow is unstoppable on this long Black Tar Road paved with good intentions.

His carefully controlled fist slices through the air just missing my face as his solid elbow connects with a deafening thud under my chin, snapping my jaw up and sideways, as my teeth and tongue collide and become one. I fall slowly as if in a dream until I smack the cold, hard stage of reality. Fake blood oozes from my mouth between the sharp edges and fragments of broken teeth floating in my mouth. The theater audience has no idea that this fight has become all too real.

On March 8th, 2010, in the middle of a choreographed stage fight during a performance of the play, Slaughter City by Naomi Wallace, at the Son of Semele Ensemble Theater in Los Angeles, I chipped my four top front teeth. Stabbing reality and the colorful haze of the imaginary world blended as I stumbled through the long scene and into the next before I could make my exit stage right. The show must go on. And life goes on. The almost spiritual connection I have with this play had suddenly taken a deeper turn and literally altered my body forever.

Does life imitate art? Or does art imitate life? From the moment I read Slaughter City, I knew I had to play the lead role of “Cod”, an immortal woman traveling back and forth through time, disguised as a man, to act as “a spark for all eternity” fueling the fire of protest of the laborer against the capitalist machine repeated throughout history. I have always been pro-union but that aspect is not what hooked me. The author, Naomi Wallace, adds a cross gender love story, marrying her socialist agenda to a politics of love and sexuality as a way of freeing ourselves from oppression. Take control of your body and take control of your life. “Coming is the body’s way of saying fuck you to the rules and regulations,” Cod says gathering union support. “I am radiant and I am fearless and I will not be disposed of; I am not a piece of meat.”

As an out, lesbian actress, this role was an enticing opportunity to indulge my butch side along with the acting challenge of passing as a man through most of the play, as well as, an opportunity to further explore my personal sexual androgynous freedom. Cod dresses as a man not only to work in the slaughterhouse but because that is how she feels most comfortable. “Working like a man I feel more like a gal, know what I mean?” she says to her female lover after her secret is revealed. In a special coaching session with Lisa Wolpe, the artistic director of the LA Women’s Shakespeare Company, I learned to literally walk like a man, presenting “the package”, taking up as much space as possible, and crushing tiny Lilliputian people beneath my feet like Gulliver from the book, Gulliver’s Travels. Lisa also stressed the importants of finding areas in the play where my vulnerability and femininity could still shine through. In my real life I appear as a soft butch on the outside but am all girl inside and I have no desire to change that because it is who I am.

During the course of the play, Cod, falls in love with, Maggot, a female worker, who believes Cod is a man. Cod is like an indentured servant forced to repeat her role as the spark of the worker capitalist conflict because of a promise made between Cod’s mother, a textile worker who died in a factory fire, and his nemesis, Sausage Man, who diabolically grinds up bodies with his sausage grinder throughout history. As conflict increases so does Cod’s temperature and she can literally burn something with the touch of her hand, including the love of her life: “If I touch what I desire, I’ll destroy it. Just one touch and toast.”

Coincidentally, just after being cast in Slaughter City, I became involved in a passionate long distance relationship with the love of my life who found me through an article on the website, AfterEllen.com written about Hellbent For Hollywood, the crash and burn acting reality television show I taped a few months ago. My girlfriend likes to describe our relationship as, “an international love buzz,” and although we have not officially met we have stayed together for five months over the course of phone calls, Facebook messages, email, texting, video Skype, and the old fashioned romance of letter writing. I know it sounds crazy and I do have a history of being a bit of a commitment-phobe, only having two relationships in my life that have lasted more than a year, but I do believe I have finally met “the one.” As Cod has been wandering through history, lost, not knowing who or where she is, I too have been looking all my life for that one soul mate that could stop time and change my course of history. She completes the puzzle and compliments me in ways I have only dreamed of but I can’t touch her. The frustration is almost unbearable. As Cod says, “I am alone, I have never been anything but alone. Let her touch me and I’ll know where I am.” Through the fire of love, Cod finally gets the confidence and drive to challenge her destiny: “Sometimes history’s just not ready for you and so you have to give it a shove.” She is accepted and touched by her lover and no one gets burned as the workers save themselves from their hell on earth by putting out the fire in the slaughterhouse fueled by the Sausage Man during a lock-in protest.

Now, throughout this play I have been ridiculously accident-prone. I have various cuts, bumps, and bruises from the fight, chains, and knives, and almost caught the stage and myself on fire, and of course, the final blow that knocked my teeth out. For the love of theatre, what’s next? And this is an Equity (stage actors union) waiver play that I am not getting paid for. The good news however is that the union requires insurance for just this kind of thing. Go union! So what is the universe trying to tell me? There are way too many coincidences coming together with this play to ignore. As much as I have bounced in and out of relationships, I have bounced in and out of my acting career, never being fully committed to either, out of fear of failure. I have recently identified feelings of inadequacy in both areas and it is coming to a head now with my new relationship and this play and it is time to change before I lose far more than my teeth. Dreams about losing one’s teeth are traditionally associated with such things as insecurity, helplessness, issues with self-image, and transitions in life. Perhaps I needed to get my teeth knocked out to drill it into my skull that I need to focus and be committed to my acting career and my love life and that they can co-exist together. As a lesbian I need to believe that my loving sexual relationship with a woman is just as strong as a heterosexual one. My girlfriend is one of the few people in my life who gets my creativity, my career choice, and me. I need to be willing to lose a small part of myself to let her in completely. I need to believe I am a talented actress and I deserve to be paid and be successful. Sometimes it is the negative experiences that lead us to the positive ones. Positive and negative, yin and yang, are intrinsically linked as are conflict and change. If I am going to change, I need to have faith in myself, be comfortable with who I am, and be focused and committed to the belief that I can and deserve to be successful in my art and in love. Due to time and financial constraints, my girlfriend and I won’t be able to see each other for another few months but when she does finally make it over here, I will greet her with a huge smile with my new set of teeth and we will embraces change together. Our love will give us the strength to push through doubt and fear and change history forever. To quote Shakespeare, “All the world’s a stage. And all the men and women merely players.”

I am alive. I am alone. I am one. I am many. I am freedom. I am powerful. I am awkward. I am self-conscious. I am androgynous. I am art. I am sexy. I am naked.

These are a few of the thoughts I experienced several years ago posing nude in an art exhibit at the Gagosian gallery in Beverly Hills for Italian artist, Vanessa Beecroft. Beecroft is famous for her live art installations of groups of women, often nude, viewed as you would a sculpture or picture. As scary as it was, that exhibit was one of the most empowering and life changing events I’ve ever experienced. Right up there with coming out as a lesbian. Both experiences forced me to come out of hiding and embrace my true self. Now I am being faced with a new challenge. Exposing myself on a reality show.

Hellbent For Hollywood is the name of the acting competition reality show I have sold my soul to. The word “hell” conjures up images of reciting Shakespeare while dancing over hot coals or receiving electric shock treatments for forgetting lines. The producers assure me this is not the case. But since when do they tell the truth on a reality show? I keep telling myself it will be one of those empowering and life changing events.

Noelle Messier

Being an introspective actor, I have battled with the concept of how best to get exposure. What is my image? My brand? What is marketable? I am an androgynous, shorthaired, pants wearing, low-voiced lesbian. For years I was in denial and dated men, grew my hair out, raised my voice, and tried to become more feminine in an attempt to be what “they” wanted. As a result, I wasted lots of time getting in and out of the closet and getting in and out of acting. It took me a while to figure out that I would never be successful without first embracing who I am. My agent has finally figured out that I get called in to audition when the post reads: androgynous, butch, lesbian, or cop; and I love it. I did a small role recently on the ABC Family show, 10 Things I Hate About You and created quite an uproar on Facebook when I posted, “nothing like having “butch lesbian” taped to your trailer.” The angry, pitchfork carrying, Facebook throng thought someone had scrawled the obscenity across my door like a Nazi swastika. “Butch Lesbian” was the name of the character and I was proud to be identified as such. Maybe being all that you can be isn’t about being everything but about being who you are.

Being cast in Hellbent for Hollywood is forcing me to market myself and grovel for votes on the Internet, but more importantly, it is giving me a chance to put my money where my mouth is. I am always the first one to say how important it is for the LGBT community to be out and visible in the media. The more we are out there, the more people will slowly begin to accept us as normal and not scary, closeted, hell bent sinners. If we can’t accept who we are, how can we expect anyone else to? So, I am planning on winning this show as an out lesbian actress come hell or high water or fire or brimstone or electric shocks or whatever. Let Everything Sexy Be IAm Naked. LESBIAN!